Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Socio-spatial analysis of small-area need and accessibility of Primary Healthcare Services in Nigeria: A sequential mixed methods study

Ph. D. Thesis.Accessibility of primary healthcare (PHC) services is crucial for maintaining the good health of a population. Not only is health(care) associated with quality of life and socioeconomic productivity, systematic variations in healthcare accessibility are matters of social justice. Consequently, the overall goal of this project is to comprehensively analyze and explain smallarea need and accessibility of PHC services in Nigeria through a case study of Kogi State, with a view to making policy-relevant recommendations. To this end, both quantitative and qualitative methods are synthesized in an ‘explanatory sequential mixed methods research design’, which also features innovative data exploitations. This entails a synergy of: Automated Zone Design method, Spatial Microsimulation Modelling, and Generalized TwoStep Floating Catchment Area method for quantitative analysis as well as qualitative framework thematic analysis, to obtain research findings that are more robust than existing studies. In this way, genuine small-area variations in PHC need and accessibility are revealed and explicated, including extreme Medically Underserved Areas (eMUAs). Urban areas are more accessible than rural areas, as expected. Of senatorial districts, Kogi Central has the best healthcare accessibility because of its topography. Furthermore, these variations are mediated by the extant sub-optimal zoning system in Nigeria, which is a product of problematic historical political processes. Not only are eMUAs both very remote and rural, they also lack basic social amenities. Hence, it is not surprising that research participants expressed a myriad of dire disincentives in meeting their PHC needs. These difficulties can be mitigated by improving the quality of road infrastructure and ensuring an optimal socio-spatial configuration of PHC services. Broad mechanisms of social exclusion are also implicated in causing access-related disutility of PHC. It is therefore crucial that holistic interventions to alleviate social exclusion are enacted, since previous efforts at addressing only proximal concerns of PHC accessibility have proven unsuccessful. Keywords: Primary Healthcare Needs, Spatial Accessibility, Mixed Methods Research, Automated Zone Design, Spatial Microsimulation, Small-Area Variations.Newcastle University Overseas Research Scholarship (NUORS), Research Excellence Academy of the Humanities and Social Science Faculty (HaSS RE

Future Transportation

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with transportation activities account for approximately 20 percent of all carbon dioxide (co2) emissions globally, making the transportation sector a major contributor to the current global warming. This book focuses on the latest advances in technologies aiming at the sustainable future transportation of people and goods. A reduction in burning fossil fuel and technological transitions are the main approaches toward sustainable future transportation. Particular attention is given to automobile technological transitions, bike sharing systems, supply chain digitalization, and transport performance monitoring and optimization, among others

Critical Asset and Portfolio Risk Analysis for Homeland Security

Providing a defensible basis for allocating resources for critical infrastructure and key resource protection is an important and challenging problem. Investments can be made in countermeasures that improve the security and hardness of a potential target exposed to a security hazard, deterrence measures to decrease the likeliness of a security event, and capabilities to mitigate human, economic, and other types of losses following an incident. Multiple threat types must be considered, spanning everything from natural hazards, industrial accidents, and human-caused security threats. In addition, investment decisions can be made at multiple levels of abstraction and leadership, from tactical decisions for real-time protection of assets to operational and strategic decisions affecting individual assets and assets comprising a regions or sector. The objective of this research is to develop a probabilistic risk analysis methodology for critical asset protection, called Critical Asset and Portfolio Risk Analysis, or CAPRA, that supports operational and strategic resource allocation decisions at any level of leadership or system abstraction. The CAPRA methodology consists of six analysis phases: scenario identification, consequence and severity assessment, overall vulnerability assessment, threat probability assessment, actionable risk assessment, and benefit-cost analysis. The results from the first four phases of CAPRA combine in the fifth phase to produce actionable risk information that informs decision makers on where to focus attention for cost-effective risk reduction. If the risk is determined to be unacceptable and potentially mitigable, the sixth phase offers methods for conducting a probabilistic benefit-cost analysis of alternative risk mitigation strategies. Several case studies are provided to demonstrate the methodology, including an asset-level analysis that leverages systems reliability analysis techniques and a regional-level portfolio analysis that leverages techniques from approximate reasoning. The main achievements of this research are three-fold. First, this research develops methods for security risk analysis that specifically accommodates the dynamic behavior of intelligent adversaries, to include their tendency to shift attention toward attractive targets and to seek opportunities to exploit defender ignorance of plausible targets and attack modes to achieve surprise. Second, this research develops and employs an expanded definition of vulnerability that takes into account all system weaknesses from initiating event to consequence. That is, this research formally extends the meaning of vulnerability beyond security weaknesses to include target fragility, the intrinsic resistance to loss of the systems comprising the asset, and weaknesses in response and recovery capabilities. Third, this research demonstrates that useful actionable risk information can be produced even with limited information supporting precise estimates of model parameters

Safety and Reliability - Safe Societies in a Changing World

The contributions cover a wide range of methodologies and application areas for safety and reliability that contribute to safe societies in a changing world. These methodologies and applications include: - foundations of risk and reliability assessment and management - mathematical methods in reliability and safety - risk assessment - risk management - system reliability - uncertainty analysis - digitalization and big data - prognostics and system health management - occupational safety - accident and incident modeling - maintenance modeling and applications - simulation for safety and reliability analysis - dynamic risk and barrier management - organizational factors and safety culture - human factors and human reliability - resilience engineering - structural reliability - natural hazards - security - economic analysis in risk managemen

U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform

The U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform was created by Congress to assess U.S. immigration policy and make recommendations regarding its implementation and effects. Mandated in the Immigration Act of 1990 to submit an interim report in 1994 and a final report in 1997, the Commission has undertaken public hearings, fact-finding missions, and expert consultations to identify the major immigration-related issues facing the United States today.LBJ School of Public Affair

The universe without us: a history of the science and ethics of human extinction

This dissertation consists of two parts. Part I is an intellectual history of thinking about human extinction (mostly) within the Western tradition. When did our forebears first imagine humanity ceasing to exist? Have people always believed that human extinction is a real possibility, or were some convinced that this could never happen? How has our thinking about extinction evolved over time? Why do so many notable figures today believe that the probability of extinction this century is higher than ever before in our 300,000-year history on Earth? Exploring these questions takes readers from the ancient Greeks, Persians, and Egyptians, through the 18th-century Enlightenment, past scientific breakthroughs of the 19th century like thermodynamics and evolutionary theory, up to the Atomic Age, the rise of modern environmentalism in the 1970s, and contemporary fears about climate change, global pandemics, and artificial general intelligence (AGI). Part II is a history of Western thinking about the ethical and evaluative implications of human extinction. Would causing or allowing our extinction be morally right or wrong? Would our extinction be good or bad, better or worse compared to continuing to exist? For what reasons? Under which conditions? Do we have a moral obligation to create future people? Would past “progress” be rendered meaningless if humanity were to die out? Does the fact that we might be unique in the universe—the only “rational” and “moral” creatures—give us extra reason to ensure our survival? I place these questions under the umbrella of Existential Ethics, tracing the development of this field from the early 1700s through Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man, the gloomy German pessimists of the latter 19th century, and post-World War II reflections on nuclear “omnicide,” up to current-day thinkers associated with “longtermism” and “antinatalism.” In the dissertation, I call the first history “History #1” and the second “History #2.” A main thesis of Part I is that Western thinking about human extinction can be segmented into five distinction periods, each of which corresponds to a unique “existential mood.” An existential mood arises from a particular set of answers to fundamental questions about the possibility, probability, etiology, and so on, of human extinction. I claim that the idea of human extinction first appeared among the ancient Greeks, but was eclipsed for roughly 1,500 years with the rise of Christianity. A central contention of Part II is that philosophers have thus far conflated six distinct types of “human extinction,” each of which has its own unique ethical and evaluative implications. I further contend that it is crucial to distinguish between the process or event of Going Extinct and the state or condition of Being Extinct, which one should see as orthogonal to the six types of extinction that I delineate. My aim with the second part of the book is to not only trace the history of Western thinking about the ethics of annihilation, but lay the theoretical groundwork for future research on the topic. I then outline my own views within “Existential Ethics,” which combine ideas and positions to yield a novel account of the conditions under which our extinction would be bad, and why there is a sense in which Being Extinct might be better than Being Extant, or continuing to exist